This must be code for: You were his driver while he went around murdering people while in full plate mail.
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Against . . . what?
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Glaive-guisarme-glaive.
Srsly, the reasons the FBI was suspicious of Gary Gygax reads like a checklist for some of our nuttier Republican congresscritters.
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No, I can’t see how anyone would think that. The Basic line was a continuation of first-edition D&D. AD&D through 3.5 were iterative improvements on the same alternative, D&D-like core. 4e was them looking at 3.5 and saying, “what if we had no sacred cows, and just gutted everything and designed it from the ground up as a modern game?” A noble experiment that did not really pan out. 5E is a deliberate correction that uses some of the mathematical underpinnings for skill checks and monsters, but take a big step back stylistically and mechanically.
- The Basic line and AD&D were both created to fix the main problem of D&D: the editing was terrible, and so everybody interpreted rules differently because they had no idea what the rules half-said.
- The Basic Line was like a continuation of 1st edition D&D. It started when Holmes wrote to Gygax to say “my friends and family really love playing your game, but the editing is a warcrime. Would you mind if I just re-edited it for free?” To which Gary very much said yes. Later editions branch out and tweak things, but Basic is still very original D&D-ish.
- AD&D (1E) was basically Gygax giving up on original D&D and starting over, basically doing an “official” D&D variant of his own to muscle out all the unofficial variants that tried to be “D&D, but with rules humans can understand/but more accurate/but with more options.” Eventually a second edition was required, then a third when WotC took over, but AD&D 1E, AD&D 2E, D&D 3E, and D&D 3.5 all share a lot of DNA.
- I only mention that to get to the 3.5 era, because in order to understand the mutant offshoot that is 4e, you have to appreciate that it tried to solve a lot of problem that were born in the 3.x era (and with related Wotc D20-based games, like d20 Modern and Star Wars RPG).
- 4e tries very hard to balance everything (that 3e failed to balance) by making every PC essentially have the same mechanical skeleton: Fighters have at will/once-per-encounter/daily special attack power. Wizards have aw/ope/d spell powers. Rogues have aw/ope/d powers. Mechanically, everything was pulled toward the middle, so things that were previously very different (fighters and wizards) are jarringly similar.
The monsters can actually be constructed on a fair schedule which can (and has) been condensed to a business card, so they start to feel similar too.
All the ill effects come in nice, smooth chunks of damage (poison, psychic, necrotic), never anything scary and jarring like level drain or deadly poison, or even rust monsters that can actually rust your gear.
Everything else is based on skill rolls, and new “skill challenge” pseudo-encounters were created to hammer that home. - Also, the language and layout of 4E was unnervingly “gamey”. For example, if you used a Rogue once-per-encounter power to throw sand in an enemy’s eyes, you become invisible for 2 rounds. Because “invisible” was already defined as a keyword that meant things, so why define it something similar? For that matter, everything had “keywords”; not monster types or spell schools, “keywords”. Distance was always in “squares”, not feet, yard, or meters.
There’s no real resource management – you can get a sunrod cheap and never need torches again, for example.
The combination of stylistic and mechanical choices mean it’s a good game, just very different from what we all previously knew as D&D. It’s like one of those variant D&Ds I mention above: D&D, but this time backed by predictable math and computer-parseable rules!
All of these are perfectly reasonable answers to the design problems that emerged in the 3.x era, but answers that cut the Gordian knot rather than untying it. The problem is fixed, but the spirit is lost. And unless you were paying attention to the clues – Europeans who wonder why “modern” countries in d20 Modern use feet; the experimental classes that worked (and didn’t) in Tome of Magic, Magic Incarnum, Book of NIne Swords, and so on; the major rules simplification that was Star Wars Saga Edition – it all came as one big system shock, and a lot of us failed the roll. - 5e is closer to 3.5 than to 4e. It’s a deliberate correction. It feels cleaner because there’s not a crushing amount of options yet. It has innovations and simplifications that it brings to the table, such as the sub-class system (archetypes, magic schools, bardic colleges, druid circles, monk styles, etc.) rather than spawn a thousand new, slightly-different classes. But it retains a lot of 4e-isms. For example, a rogue can invariably defeat a magic trap with his tools by destroying the magic runes (there are always magic runes) with a high enough skill check. There are never any traps (in official products) that really force creative thinking.
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Magic: the Gathering is still the largest product they have.
Duel Masters is a close second. Which is funny because they launched it thinking “all these Japanese games are coming over and winning big… if we can make a splash in the tough Japanese market, we should be great enough that global success follows!” Nope. Big in Japan. And nowhere else.
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5e is a welcome simplification compared to earlier editions, and has allowed our game group to focus more on the storytelling aspects than digging into rules arcana and endless options to tweak you character. Which, don’t get me wrong, is fine if you like that. Although I think Pathfinder is a better culmination of the “more complexity” line of development.
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right? Mine has to be downright boring
It has innovations … such as the sub-class system … monk styles
I’m…not sure I’d call that an innovation. Paizo, a major 3rd party for 3.5, released Pathfinder when they smelled blood during the 4e debacle and the core rulebook, released 7 years before 5e, contains archetypes and monk styles (if they’re the same as in pf, where you can go down a feat tree and basically specialize what kind of fighter your monk is. I don’t have my books handy at the second.) I’d bet that those particular ‘innovations’ date back before the Pathfinder Core Rulebook too.
Oh hey, @Yri is a Pathfinder fan too; I kinda felt the need to point it out since everyone was gushing over 5e 
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Wisdom saving throw against a mental affliction/status effect? I just recently started playing D&D so i’m not particularly savvy.
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Wow… tax dollars at work. Almost enough to make one a libertarian (not really)
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You probably failed your CHA check. Don’t sweat it, it’s a dump stat.
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It’s the other way if anything.
5e trims a lot of the rules and keeps things much looser, though nowhere near the slim Rules Cyclopedia or something.
4e is some of the best math put to gaming, especially when monsters got more dangerous.
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They don’t use the word “sub-class” in 5e a lot, but that’s what they are. They prefer to call the bard sub-classes “bardic colleges”, and the druid sub-classes “druid circles” and so on. (Although they got a little lazy with “ranger archetypes…”). Each is a list of additional spells you know, proficiencies you have, features you get at various levels. 5E feats are presented as an alternative to the +1 attribute increase you get on some levels, so you get fewer of them and they have to be more meaningful to be of equivalent power. For a lot of the smaller feats (cough fighter feats cough), this meant combining 3 or 4 of them into one feat.
The Pathfinder story, as you probably know, is a lot more complicated.
For those interested:
Basically, Paizo was spun off by WotC as a separate company with a D&D license to publish the Dungeon and Dragon magazines, published a lot of content over the years (some which went on to form the basis for the expansion rulebooks, like Races of the Dragon), and then when 4E was announced, WotC basically didn’t return their calls for 9 months. Instead, WotC was sitting on the information that they were going to move to an online, subscription-based platform called D&D Insider. Of course, since this was the era that also had the innovation of the Open Game License and the open System Reference Document (an open source agreement for game rules that WotC – correctly – felt would bootstrap D&D 3E and make it the lingua franca of gaming), they just started publishing their own 3.5-ish RPG. And the rest is history, because 4E managed to irk a lot of people who saw no reason to change rule sets. It’s kind of amazing that they were stupid enough to try an online platform (again, for the third time in WotC D&D history) and edge out their magazine licensee when they knew the OGL was still very real. They baked it into the 4E D&D license for a while that you could either publish 3.5 SRD content or 4E D&D content, but not both, but of course that didn’t convince manyto jump on the 4E bandwagon.
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Not if you’re a bard.
And it’s worth noting that, to this day, all rules in Pathfinder are published under the OGL. This is a big part of why I absolutely love Pathfinder but I can’t stand 5E: If I want to find rules in PF for books I dont have, or I don’t want to look through my books, I can do to d20pfsrd and look at every race, every class, every subclass, every mechanic that’s been published, assuming that the guy who runs the site has had time to transcribe it.
If I want to find out something about 5E the answer is that WotC never bothered defining it or it’s locked away and you’re technically not allowed to post it online. WotC published the “Basic Rules” which let you run a tiny skeleton of a game under OGL but everything else is proprietary as I understand it.
To bring things a bit more on-topic, do we know anything about how Gary viewed PF? Seeing as a lot of people, myself included, see it as the true heir to D&D.
EDIT:
I did a bit of quick searching. Turns out Gary’s been dead (and I’ve been reading BB) for longer than I thought. He died a month after PF was announced, not a couple years like I thought.
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Even with +10 Charisma??
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Sounds akin to a classic vampire. Scary but able to use their charms on the common folk.
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Technically the core rules came out in 2008, and archetypes came out in 2010. Even more technically, archetypes existed in 3.5 but were far less prevalent (like cloistered cleric). Paizo just tweaked them a bunch for better or worse like they did with all the OGL rules.
No that I proved my cred I can say that I hate 3.pf era games 
[quote=“tekk, post:36, topic:102896”]
And it’s worth noting that, to this day, all rules in Pathfinder are published under the OGL.
[/quote]Only because they literally had no choice, they still have many things on the SRD that are renamed because Golarion content has been banned online. Rumors are that Starfinder will not have the same open experience that you get to have with Pathfinder.
Do they comment on the name “Gygax?”
It’s just not natural.
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